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The Internet: The TCP protocol

thevalleyofcode.com · 8 words · saved by 1 readers

TCP means Transfer Control Protocol, and it’s the basis of the Web and other applications like Email. Defined in RFC 793 in 1981, TCP is one of the oldest pillars of the Internet. TCP sits on top of the Internet Protocol (IP). Upon it, other application-level protocols like HTTP, FTP, IMAP (and many others) operate. TCP, contrary to IP and UDP, is connection oriented. Before transmission can happen over TCP, a connection must be established. Data is sent, in form of little packets, and when the communication ends the connection is closed. When data is transmitted over TCP, there’s a relatively complex workflow called handshake that must happen. I will not go into the details here, but this handshake allows the end-to-end connection to happen, and this makes sure TCP can provide one of its peculiar features: reliability. Using TCP, we can always know if a packet the sender sent was received correctly by the receiver. If a packet gets lost, the protocol is able to handle it and the packe

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